Quote:
Originally Posted by BJMoose
You can't. Science is not about feelings; it is about facts. Those who do not grasp that basic axiom are idiots.
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That's true, but it's not the whole story. You could say the temperature today in Pittsburgh is 74°F. That is a fact. Then you have to put it in context - is that unseasonably warm for this date and this location? Is there a trend? Does the tendency of that trend rise above the noise in the data? What are the temperature trends in the areas surrounding PA? In all of North America? On other continents? Can you take that data and forecast forward? How accurate are those forecasts? What model did you use to generate them? Are the models you used accurate/complete/well-informed?
People can take facts and bundle them with other facts to tell a story that aligns with their agenda. You could bundle them with a whole different set of facts and tell a different story. People can use facts to build a model that gives them a prediction they want to see. Other people can develop different models that produce different predictions.
Scientific communities are designed to be self-policing, e.g. people reproduce other studies to validate data, peer reviewed journals are intended to weed out data presented with insufficient rigor or skewed conclusions. These systems are set up to try to minimize the impact of feelings or agendas in looking at what's factual. Even with all of that there can be a lack of consensus as to what a given set of facts means, and there are those who have zero qualms about misrepresenting facts or ignoring inconvenient ones to push their own agendas.